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Netflix employees have one less thing to keep track of: the amount of vacation days they take. Co-founder Reed Hastings recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that Netflix has an unlimited vacation policy.

Resumator

Signing up for the demo was a breeze. No credit cards required.

I was initially presented with a page to create a new job. This wasn’t what I wanted to do initially but I created a dummy one just to work through the process. Options on the job posting seem OK, if a little US focused, for example “states” are listed by default (on the assumption that I’m in the USA) and the preset prequalification (canned) questions were rather US focused such as “Felony Conviction” or “Grade Point Average (GPA)” and no sign of “work visas”. However, new questions are configurable through the settings options.

The application process candidates goes through is based on a workflow. The default being:

1. Filed for Later

2. Reviewed

3. Phone Screened

4. Scheduling Interview

5. Interview Scheduled

6. Interviewed

7. Checking References

8. Put On Hold

9. Made Offer

These can be changed or new workflows created, which is useful.

I have to assign “Job Board Categories” when posting a job. I can see why this might be useful for some organisations, but not for me as all jobs are likely to be in the same category… unless I use this for “departments”.

After applying through the system, candidates can be assigned by admin users to categories, and these can be defined. so for our use, I’d probably use these for the “departments” (development, project management etc) as well as “multilingual”, as this is useful for us.

Very usefully, evaluation templates can be created, and these are used as a checklist against each candidates application. Parameters can be set for each element, so for example, you can list the requirements of the job, and assign units of measure against each (such as ranking 1-10, yes/no etc) you can also weight each item too as a %. This feature is very useful when reviewing lots of CVs as well as knowing (or proving) why a certain decision was made. So its crutial to define these for each job. There is also a feature that links to a system called Smarterer, but I’m not familiar with that yet.

From an admin perspective, job applications are processed through the system (or details uploaded manually), and CVs are Parsed using Scribd (which seemed to take ages for the first one I added, but eventually worked ok). Some details are extracted from the CV and you’ll need to check these and add further details where appropriate.

You can also upload candidates CVs directly to a job application using a custom email address provided for each job (10 jobs at a time max) which is useful if you have a backlog of CVs.

The site creates a jobs listing for you on a sub domain on their site (eg: http://pharmiweb.theresumator.com) , and there are various options for configuring templates and display of this. This would be useful for creating a page on your existing website, although no searching or other functionality exists here other than a simple listing.

You can have unlimited users of the account, and users can be hiring leads, admins etc, so each job can be assigned to a hiring lead for example.

Overall presentation seems very good and is really quite simple to get to grips with. Its obviously USA focused, but that shouldn’t be a showstopper for the rest of us.

Price

$99/month for 5 Job slots, $20 for each additional job slot. Pay month-to-month, and change your plan at any time. There are never any contracts to sign or any big commitments to make.

Conclusion

I liked Resumator a lot, and its in use by some pretty big names (Mashable, Pinterest etc), it was certainly the most flexible and best presented ATS I looked at, and although it may not be prefect for everyone, it suits us at this time.

As you may have heard by now, Facebook have launched their new Job Board App.

By partnering with some existing boards like Monster, jobVite, us.jobs, work4labs & branchout, they have added 1.9 million jobs to their new board.

Clearly this is following in LinkedIn’s footsteps, who make most of their income from recruitment based advertising, so it must be a bit of a concern for LinkedIn themselves. However, on first viewing I don’t think they’ve got much to worry about immediately.

In many ways its disappointing, as search is crude, results are variable. There’s definitely no WOW here, and, other than the quantity of jobs, they’ve a long way to go before they get anywhere near your average job board. Personally I think that the average candidate would rather see 10 really well-matched jobs than have to search 1.9 million random ones.

I guess Facebook, although they potentially know lots about you, don’t have the same sort of profile information that LinkedIn have. So they’re at a disadvantage there.

We’d better watch the space though as Facebook will have plans, and they’ve got the money to implement them, and the audience to push them to.